


The Only Way to See

by MundaneChampagne



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: Art, Destroy Ending, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-28
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-01-06 07:34:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,245
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12206709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MundaneChampagne/pseuds/MundaneChampagne
Summary: “Always wanted to learn how to paint. Now, I mostly paint walls with Reaper blood. Not the same, but it’s a living.”In the wake of the war, Garrus takes art lessons as he waits for Shepard to heal.





	1. Seeing

**Author's Note:**

> Had this in the back of my mind for ages, and it's coming easier than any of my other projects right now. Trying to get back into the habit of writing, so please enjoy.
> 
> The art lessons here are very much inspired by a college drawing course I took. That professor was brilliant in her methods of teaching (unfortunately she retired my senior year), so consider this a shoutout to her and to everyone learning to Art.

Muted sounds beyond the walls of the room. Inside, a quiet humming, beeping of machines—woosh of a ventilator, ticking of the IV line.

A PA, in the distance, words faded by distance—mental and physical.

She lies there in the bed—angry red skin grafts, stark lines of stitches, slings and scars to repair bones. Eyes closed. Medically induced coma. Sedated for healing.

It hurts to see her this way. And yet he can't drag himself away from her bedside.

Like those long years on Omega. Waiting, not waiting—not sure for what, not sure of any kind of future.

After all they've been through, he can't believe that the universe would dare take her away.

 

It rains a lot in London. The rain carries with it the ash and dust of war. Turns the raindrops black, the sky black.

"You need to get away," Liara told him. "Take some time for yourself. It's not good to be closeted up in a hospital room for weeks on end."

He didn't disagree. So he trudges down the street tucked under an umbrella—the rain here is cold, not like the warm rain on Palaven.

The people of London, he was told, had a long tradition of what they called "keeping a stiff upper lip". Old propaganda posters from some human war have been revived and plastered everywhere: "Keep calm and carry on." Their entire way of life had been under attack—yet they soldiered on, rebuilding with the same stoicism with which they faced the war.

And among this façade of normalcy, Garrus had found a human teaching art lessons.

So he signed up.

Now he is convinced it was a mistake. He misses being at Shepard's side—the sounds of the machines a reassurance that she was still alive.

He tries to talk himself out of it, but keeps walking forward anyway.

When he arrives at the studio—a portion of an old warehouse that missed the destruction—lights are on and an old human woman is standing at the door.

"You're the only one who signed up," she says.

 

She doesn't ask him why he's here, which suits him just fine. Instead, she hands him a pencil and a sketchpad—"to keep"—and points to a small arrangement of objects sitting on a table, lit strongly from one side. "Draw these," she says.

He blinks at her in confusion. "I don't know how," he says.

She smiles. "So when you finish this class, you can look back and see what you've learned."

 

He has a rough sketch. It looks like a child's drawing, Garrus thinks. He's not sure how to render things, to make them look real. There was a skull, a vase of flowers—so he drew them. And the result is a childish idea of what a skull and vase of flowers might look like.

(He's not sure what the skull is—it's from some Earth animal, he's sure. It's long and the teeth are flat)

He's frustrated by the end of the exercise. He can see the objects clearly, but something in his brain must be broken, he thinks. Or his hand, that he cannot translate what he sees to the paper.

She has him flip that sketch to the back of the book, then hands him another set of drawing tools. "Play with these," she says. "Just get used to the feel, and what kinds of marks they make on the paper."

The pencil—hard, smooth on the page. Precise. The small sticks of compressed charcoal—they break so easily in his hands and the dust flows over the paper like water. A squishy blob—to erase. She has him use it to lift the charcoal away, to reveal parts of the paper previously covered.

This part is fun. All his thoughts about war and death but mostly Shepard wash away, and he is left with the tools in his hands, the feeling as he moves them randomly over the paper. Pressing hard, then soft. Scribbling big blobs, trying a new angle, enjoying all the different marks he can make.

This is more what he'd expected art to be like, and it is wonderful.

But that evening, he is back at Shepard's bedside, and the joy ebbs.

 

"Art is about learning to see," she says. "Being able to render what you see is secondary—first you have to see it as it actually is, and not what your mind makes it into."

Garrus thinks he understands.

She has a antique slide projector with her, and projects an image onto the wall. The image is blurred beyond all recognition—blobs and patches of light and dark, maybe vague hints of shapes.

She has him use the charcoal to recreate it.

"Every day," she says, "I'll bring the image into focus a little more. And as the details are revealed, you'll revise the drawing to reflect what you see. It helps when you don't know what you're looking at. You can let go of preconceptions, and focus on what is actually there."

So he starts. Light here—dark here. Quick transition between the two, slower in that corner. Slowly the blobs on the wall start to emerge on his page.

After a few hours, she refocuses the image.

He finds himself trying to guess what it is—not terribly helpful as he refines his blobs into slightly more defined blobs. Charcoal dust spills over his fingers and stains the floor.

At the end of the day, he peels off his gloves. They need a good washing. But the page—there's something taking shape there.

 

He talks with the doctors. The swelling in Shepard's brain is slowly going down. They'll be able to wake her up, they estimate—but not for another week and a half.

A week and a half suddenly becomes forever.

 

Every day, the image comes into clearer view. Sometimes she flips the slide in a different direction, so that he has to flip his paper as well. It keeps him focused on what he sees—actually sees—not what he think might be there.

Soon, an old human photograph emerges from the blur. An urban scene, kids playing in the street—there's no way he's going to be able to render that, he thinks, until he looks down at his paper and realizes that he already has.


	2. Blind Contour

Shepard makes small noises in her drug-induced sleep, whimpering around the ventilator. Her hands twitch.

Garrus leans over, cups her face as best he can with all the tubes and wires, strokes her skin, and whispers comforts to her until she calms.

It's 2 in the morning.

 

"The result of this exercise isn't important. Your drawings will look strange. The purpose is to train your hand to replicate what your eyes are seeing."

Garrus blinks at her. The idea of drawing without looking at the paper is odd to him. He looks over at the piece he'd completed before, and reminds himself that he _can_ do this.

She has him take off his glove—he hesitates—they both quickly figure out that the cultural miscommunication is not a serious one—and he props his hand up on a table. Glances at his paper, sets the pencil down on it, then returns his gaze to his hand.

"Follow the edges of things," she said. "Feel them with your pencil. Trace all the lines that you see. And do not lift your pencil from the page—if you need to go back, just follow the line back."

She sits there and draws with him, so their silence is not awkward—both are concentrating fiercely.

Lines—the edges of his hand, the small wrinkles on his palm, the curves of his talons—they are all traced onto the page. It is a struggle not to look at the paper.

When he finishes and glances down at the paper, it is with disappointment.

"It's ok," she says, seeing his face. "You're busy learning."

She shows him her drawing—it is as messy as his is, yet vastly more detailed.

"Try going more slowly next time," she says.

He flips to a new sheet of paper, and they begin again.

 

Several more drawings later, and Garrus can see a change. The lines don't match up—he suspects they never will—but it looks _more_ like a hand than his first attempts. Even with the how mangled the drawing is, it is a hand. A real one.

She sends him off that night with instructions to practice. The subject doesn't matter.

The rain hasn't let up. The smog chokes his breath. When he gets back to Shepard's bedside, it is with relief. He sheds his rain gear and sits in the stiff chair.

One of her feet peeks out from underneath the blankets. Garrus finds himself mesmerized by the shape of it. The graceful curves, the way the lines flow into each other. So different from a turian foot, but made for the exact same purpose.

After hesitating for a moment, he gets out his sketchpad and puts pencil to paper, never taking his eyes off Shepard's foot the whole time.

 

Human feet and hands decorate the pages.

She looks at him. "Who is this?" she asks.

"My girlfriend," he says. "She's in the hospital."

She nods, doesn't make any comment about him having a human girlfriend. "I'm glad the war didn't take her from you."

He nods, and they sit again with their paper.

They swap after a bit, drawing each other's hands. Garrus doesn't do too badly, having spent time looking at Shepard's hands last night, but she has more trouble figuring out how turian digits work. Garrus laughs out loud when he sees some of her drawings.

They move onto faces. Staring at each other while both drawing. It's a bit odd for Garrus—they're focused so intently on each other, but only the details—not on the actual person.

Her face isn't like many other humans he's seen. She's older—heavily wrinkled. Wears a scarf tied around her head, hair falling out in twists—some of the twists have beads. Absolutely unlike all the military people he's familiar with.

That night, he draws Shepard's face. And finds himself lingering over each moment, each line, curve, spot—it's all Shepard, all of it. And tonight, her face is relaxed and peaceful.


	3. Gesture

A series of images flash in front of his face. His mandibles clenched tightly to his jaw, he quickly renders each one as best as he can, trying to convey the human body with simple strokes of the pencil, movement with a curved line, weight and balance with heavier and lighter lines.

When she turns the projector off, he looks up from his paper. "They're all humans," he says.

She frowns slightly. "I…don't have anything else."

So Garrus improvises.

Images of the Reaper-things, left over on his omnitool from his stint on Menae, training the people under him to recognize all the variations and fight against them more effectively. A human husk, lunging forward. A turian marauder with a long rifle.

Garrus sets his omnitool to flicker through those images, and they both sketch the lines of movement together.

At one point she gasps. "What is that?"

"We called them brutes," Garrus says. "Cobbled out of a turian and a krogan…the Reapers used all these as ground troops. I think they counted on the fear of seeing your own dead turned against you."

Her hands shake, but they finish the series of gesture drawings with no more comment.

 

There is no movement in Shepard's hospital room for Garrus to draw.

Soon, the doctors tell him. Soon.

 

Images of human dancers flicker on the wall. Garrus is transfixed by all the ways the human body can move. Yes, he's seen humans in battle and been impressed (especially with Shepard, who treats battle as its own dance—or at least she did), but without armor and with no other thought but movement, the human body becomes almost divine.

When they're done with that set of images, Garrus finds more photos of his own. This time, from the party. His friends are not as graceful dancers as the ones in her photos, but he knows them, knows their stories, and tells them as they draw.

He is particularly fond of a sketch he does of Samantha, her hands over her head as she dances without care. He'll have to send it to her.

Once communication infrastructure is up again, anyway.

 

The rain stops for a few days, and Garrus is relieved that he doesn't have to shelter his paper under his jacket on his trips from the hospital to the warehouse and back.

The doctors are weaning Shepard off the sedative. It will take some time for her to wake up, but she will wake up, they say. The drugs are hallucinatory, so she may experience some distress. If that happens, try to keep her calm, and call the nurse. It may be upsetting to her if she wakes while still intubated, so be prepared for that.

Garrus's head is spinning, and nothing he draws in the hospital comes out right.


	4. Studies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today I got home early enough to attend to my beehives, take a nap, and write??? What is this manner of sorcery?

Garrus feels horrible leaving Shepard's bedside each day, but he has to, he tells himself. Listen to Liara's advice. He knows he'd go crazy otherwise.

In the studio, he can free his thoughts from Shepard and take a piece of charcoal up in his hand, work it over paper, turn it on its edge or use the flat side. The dust falls to the floor, stains it, and what's left behind looks like water or air on the paper.

They work through a series of black and white slides. Quick studies of each, an hour in length. Earth, in all its beauty. Massive redwood trees—he tips the charcoal back and forth, attempting to convey the thickness of the branches. Rock and waves—a rough texture here, scraping the charcoal over the paper. A texture so vivid he thinks he could reach out and touch it, but when he does, it's only paper, and the dust. Lifting away charcoal with an eraser, adding shades of grey to the black and white. A thing humans call a lighthouse—a mountain—a river. An animal with a neck as long and tall as a tree.

This is Earth, he thinks. Where Shepard and her people come from. It's much more varied in climate and landscape than Palaven. And if he's any judge, Earth will go on long after the Reapers tried to destroy it.

 

Sometimes Shepard flails in bed, punching or kicking. Garrus tries to catch her arms when she does this, mindful of the possibility of her ripping out her IV line. He talks to her, tries to calm her, wonders if she's still fighting the war inside her head.

 

When his hands are stained black from charcoal, he can leave the war in his own head behind.

 

The doctors remove the tube. She breathes on her own, sometimes greedily. Each breath she takes is like music to him. Sometimes her eyes open, and Garrus remembers just how beautiful they are. He can't tell if she's really here yet, if she's actually perceiving things or if it's just physiological responses playing tricks on him.

 

He swears he'll be by her side the instant she is lucid.

 

He isn't.

 

He ducks into the hospital from the pouring rain, which has returned with a vengeance. A nurse draws him aside. "She's awake. She's been asking for you."

Garrus almost drops his papers and dashes up to her room.

He bursts in through the door and Shepard is sitting up in bed, her face pale and drawn but it's _her_.

"Garrus," she says, her voice raspy, her face lighting up.

He does drop his papers then, and goes and cradles her face in his hands. "Shepard," he whispers, touching his forehead to hers, and feeling the wetness on her cheeks.


	5. Color

When she says "Color," he thinks of the new flush on Shepard's cheeks, the depth of her eyes, and the beam of light that fell across her face that morning.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Do you want to start with color?"

He has no formal training in color theory, so she draws out a color wheel and shows him how colors connect. He repeats the exercise on his own paper, and when she sees it, her face falls. "You're not…color blind by any chance?"

Garrus tilts his head. "I've always had excellent color vision. Why?"

And that's how they find out that humans and turians see color differently.

 

They work through it. They check on each other's work, make sure it scans for both human and turian eyes. She only has human pigments, but she keeps the colors well labeled, and he tries to find equivalents that work for turian eyes.

Color opens up a whole new world. He learns about the colors of shadows and light, vibrancy and dullness, color schemes and contrast. He takes delight in lining colors up next to each other, finding what works and what doesn't.

And when he leaves for the day, he's now covered in chalk and pastel dust. A rainbow mixed in with the charcoal.

 

Shepard is delighted when he gets back. She smiles, only twitching slightly as the motion pulls at her stitches. Garrus sits beside he, and she reaches out, catches his hand, smears the colorful dust around with her finger.

"I think that's so cool," she told him when he mentioned art lessons.

He twitched a mandible. "As long as you don't mind me being away every day."

Shepard rolled her eyes as best as she could. "If I could get out of this hospital for a little bit, I would too."

He showed her his contour drawings of her. She was flattered. "I don't think that looks like my foot, but I like it."

"How often do you look at your own feet?" he teased.

She smiled. "Often enough to know that it only has one outline."

Now, she laughs as she tries to wipe the pastel dust off on her bedsheet, only for the sheet to turn colors as well. "I don't think they have rules on art supplies in hospital rooms, but better wash your gloves just to be sure."

And they'd better not have rules on art supplies in hospital rooms, because that would mean that Garrus can't sit next to her bedside and draw her.

Which he does. Her face catching the setting sun, the warm tones scattering across her skin and making her look more alive than she has in months.

He shows it to her when he's done, and she smiles. "Maybe I'll go down in history as the famous artist's model, rather than as Commander Shepard."

"That would make me the famous artist," he says.

She catches his hands and squeezes. "I would not mind playing second fiddle for a change." And he has no idea what that human idiom means, but the sun is sinking under the horizon and now the fluorescent light rules the hospital room. He gets up and dims the lights, enjoys the play of shadow across her face. And as much as he longs for the sun's light to come back so he can admire her in it, for now he's content to hold her hand and spend the night in contended quiet.


End file.
